On the public record

Very much enjoyed Plastrik and Cleveland’s paper Can It Happen Here? Improving the Prospect for Managed Retreat by U.S. Cities. Recommend. Here is an online summary. My brief thoughts follow.

Before this paper, I had considered that the alternative to managed retreat was post-disaster unmanaged retreat. Plastrik and Cleveland point out a different, pre-disaster retreat, in which people leave as they can afford it, leaving behind a patchwork too thin to support itself economically.  I had recognized this as a consequence of ag water markets, but not seen the application to urban systems.

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Plastrik and Cleveland discuss the legal implications of retreat on page 36*:

Cities worry about whether certain retreat policies would trigger a ”taking” of property and its economic value and require compensation for the owners. For instance, in Del Mar, California, owners of oceanfront properties worth millions of dollars contended that the city’s consideration of managed retreat was devaluing their property.

I would like to see vigorous pushback against this error. The risk itself is devaluing the property. If the ocean were not going to move into the house, a city’s consideration of response options would not devalue the property.

I have further seen people object to planning for managed retreat because the planning effort might destroy the illusion that the house has future value. If that is the rationale for protesting the planning effort, then the clear solution is to destroy the illusion that the house has future value right away, and then plan for managed retreat. For example, by putting up a series of billboards in every coastal town, illustrating the reach of sea level rise. We cannot all pretend that a terrible thing is not coming because some homeowners want us to so that someone ignorant might buy their liability of a house.

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At the bottom of page 24, Plastrik and Cleveland quote:

“People and communities who emerge from a storm often identify as ‘survivors,’” noted a Lincoln Institute of Land Policy report. “This sentiment makes them more likely to oppose retreat.”

Reporters could combat this tendency by referring to people who have survived natural disaster as “escapers” instead of “survivors.”

The Appendix (pages 40 – 41) list tool that cities could use to herd people away from disaster-prone areas. They range from zoning to buyouts, all to positively incentivize people away from the coast or floodplain. Honestly, I’d like to see more in the way of negative incentives –making it very expensive for people to stay.  Reflecting the true costs of insurance is the only one that I know of in current practice, and there is political pressure to buffer that. But charging people who won’t leave the shoreline for the lost beach and recreation, making them pay into funds for the clean-up of their homes when they collapse, that type of thing. The whole discussion is oriented around a positive financial pull for getting people out of risky areas, and (especially for the rich ones), I’d like to see more negative financial push.

*See, Professor Bendell? See how easy that was?

Honestly, California just fell behind. Once they were behind, they never did manage to catch up. The signs were there early, but instead of being taken as warnings, people took the fastest shortcut. When PG&E started cutting power to areas to avoid fires, instead of implementing a huge push of distributed power and solar facilities, it was cheaper to do nothing and let people buy generators. After paying for decades of mismanagement at PG&E, the ratepayers had no stomach for the costs of constructing a grid that could withstand a hotter climate. So we did patchwork fixes. That type of thing.

The Legislature had learned the lesson of the gas tax recall too well. Rather than go all in on a massive scale carbon tax, they tried tinkering with nudges and opportunity districts and cap-and-trade grants. They were never willing to risk their seats with massive wealth transfers from millionaires to the poor, so many climate change reforms were reasonably called elitism that would hurt a poor constituency.  Without the buffer of redistributed wealth, people couldn’t do anything but they cheapest, short-term solutions. To this day, I don’t know how the Governor can live with himself; he had small children! But his administration fucked around with buzzwords instead of facing the issues. If you remember, his early themes of Multi-Benefit Magic!, Portfolio Power! and Resilience Reward! were never adequate to the threat.

Years 1-3

It felt like we were doing the work. Each year, there were good proposals, to accelerate housing or to tackle public health problems. It wasn’t a massive carbon tax, but they were also important issues. Each year, they got pushed back, but we knew they would pass soon. Each year, the fires got worse, but people got used to that. Proposed new building codes never did quite pass and no one wanted to infringe on people’s freedom to live wherever they wanted. In every aspect of life, everything just cost more. It cost more to put in water recycling in urban areas. It cost more to meet new wastewater treatment standards. The costs of meat were going up after the Midwest crop failures. Even people who could afford it got tired of paying and paying and paying. The counties couldn’t ever really cover the costs of blue-green algae blooms and new Valley Fever outbreaks and disposing of thousands of dead cows after heat waves. Without much discussion, they quietly stopped doing much.

Still, people were trying, with their Teslas. It was just that their own neighborhood wasn’t a good fit for a big multi-family “skyscraper”. No one wanted to see homelessness get even worse, but it just wasn’t right to get rid of local authority. After all, what could a Sacramento bureaucrat know about what made a neighborhood special? So even if we wanted to take some of the climate refugees from Central America, there really wasn’t any place to put them. Climate grief spread. People wished they could do something, but it was never really clear what could help. We couldn’t get rid of cars, could we?

Years 4-6

We were completely unprepared for The Bad Year. Having the flood knock out two major cities and interrupt water deliveries to the southland meant that there simply weren’t enough personnel to fight fires in the fall. The floods left debris, molds and polluted waters everywhere. Maybe that was where the virus came from. The kids’ lungs were already weakened from the yearly smoke. It raged through the State.

After the sickness, we never got back on track. The Governor established Freedom Zones. In a Freedom Zone, there were no annoying regulations and no hope of government help after a disaster either. If you wanted to build your home in the path of fire, no one would stop you. No one would help you when the fire came, either.  The Resnicks kinda started the Wonderful! Zones by themselves.  They promised water, food and housing to people who signed twenty-year indentures to process their crops. Whole towns signed on, re-named Wonderful!Towns. The California government was relieved to have those regions taken off their hands. It began negotiations with Facebook and Apple to form their own Zones. People got very upset about that on Twitter.

Years 7-10

Even as California struggled, it was still in better shape than lots of places.   In many of the Zones, life was pretty stable. Golden State Power said they’d restore five days of power to the Mountain Freedom Zone within two years.  In Wonderful!Zone, nut exports were holding steady, as the Resnicks consolidated their water districts. They began selling water to Los Angeles and south, who were happy for the steady supply. Cleanup of the flooded areas wasn’t quite finished, but the people who moved back to the Flood Freedom Zone knew that there could never be a flood like that again. The Bay Area corporation zones had begun to build a water project to tap the rivers in the north state. “Unfinished business to develop security”, they called it. California and the feds sold them the northern portions of the water project

The new governor came in promising green bonds,  major market reforms and tax relief. She also talked about requiring the corporate zones to take their fair share of refugees, but never quite explained how she could do that while honoring Local Authority. The fires were still bad but everyone agreed that anyone in a freedom zone shouldn’t build any housing they weren’t willing to lose every few years.

There wasn’t much talk anymore about fighting climate change. A few hippies were still talking about all the wildlife that had gone extinct. But it was all people could do to keep up with normal life.  They were exhausted from grief, from the epidemics, from being helpless while things went wrong. There wasn’t anything left for making major longterm projects.  We did our best, but it was setback after setback from then on out, with each new normal worse than the last.

Maybe it was the holiday strikes of 2019, when the kids walked out, telling their parents and the world that they had nothing to be thankful for and what they wanted for Christmas was a planet they could live on.  Or maybe it was the unbearable hot, smoky August and September and October and the pictures of that fire raging through that school. Maybe the politicians finally listened to the polls saying that Californians were desperate to address climate change. But there were no real protests when Governor Newsom declared a statewide emergency and unveiled his shocking climate plan. People were prepared by the analogy to the WWII homefront, and were ready to do their part the way their grandparents did. It would take the rest of the decade to ramp up, but by the last few years, the benefits were already paying off.

Starting instantly

The State stopped making it worse. Oil and gas extraction ended on Day 1. (When the oil companies sued for takings, the State seized their properties and CARB instituted a retroactive carbon absorption fee for California’s atmosphere.)  Permitting for development in floodplains, wildfire areas and on the coast was immediately halted and cities that weren’t creating new dense housing lost their land use authority. The State imposed shocking gas taxes, and returned the proceeds to the poorest half of Californians. The ag districts in the SWP were immediately shut down, as were any dairies with more than a couple hundred cows.

Major research programs were begun.  Google and Facebook began a program to create carbon budgets for every person, measured and traded by phone. The weapons industry was told to do something useful for a change, and develop carbonless aviation and shipping.

Years 0-3

California immediately designated five new future UC campuses, in Visalia, Redding, Camp Roberts, Ventura and Fresno. It began building out residences for 40,000 people at each new campus. For the first decade, however, the future campuses would house refugees who wanted to earn California citizenship by doing four years of paid climate labor.

The potential work was endless. Fighting fires. Installing solar panels. Planting urban trees. Building housing. Installing cooling centers and pools. Clearing dead trees in the Sierras.  Building up sheep and goat grazing stocks to clear fire fuels. Moving levees back from rivers; restoring riparian habitats. Restoring tule marsh in the Delta, island by island. Building high speed rail. California was lucky to absorb tens of thousands of refugees and their families each year, willing to work for pay, education and state citizenship.

These early years felt hard. The hits kept coming: the heat waves, the fires, the drought. The disruption of construction on every block. People scrambled as long commutes became too expensive, but new housing close to work wasn’t built yet. The Olds hated the changes, talked about how everything used to be cheaper. The Youngs, though, just felt relieved that maybe they had a chance.

Years 4-7

By years 4 and 5, the building spree was beginning to pay off. Dorms and family housing at the five new campuses were nearly complete; the academic buildings were starting to go up. Throughout the state, the ex-urban fringes were emptying out, moving into town. People talked about their old commutes like a horror movie. Electricity from renewables, at least, was cheap and plentiful. People were adjusting to their personal carbon budgets, clamoring for the app to recognize the carbon sequestration in their backyard compost. The first group of refugees finished their four years of service.  Many stayed on, working the jobs they knew, in the places they had built. Others moved throughout the state, glad that they had had a stable transition. There were always more coming behind, hoping to fill their spaces.

The habitat work continued, led by Tribes, building on itself.  California set up a food security regime, creating an agricultural zone on three million acres of its best soils and most robust water sources, growing food for direct human consumption. CA would ensure this land would get water in the driest years. Other previous ag land was transitioned to sequestering carbon or solar power.

It was about year 6 that people started to notice that things had stopped getting worse every year. They had heatwaves, but everyone could get to cold water to cool off and mostly everyone had air conditioning powered by solar. In year 6, instead of losing an additional town to fire every year, CA lost no towns to fire. The fuels management, grazing and intentional burns, and the new building codes were starting to catch up. By good luck (and good choices when the project was selected) when the flood came, it was held within the new setback levees, where it sat, recharging groundwater for six months into the summer.  (The mosquitos were horrendous, but it was better than being washed away.)

Years 8-10

The carbon sequestration/habitat restoration projects were really starting to settle in and complexify.  People began to accept that they were the work of many lifetimes, and each of the new UCs had departments dedicated to the study of local restoration. Even these newly restored habitats were doing their jobs; seagrasses were reversing beach erosion and softening waves. Soils were re-gaining their organic content and holding more water; rivers were finding their old meanders and re-connecting to groundwater. The State proudly displayed their ticker of Total Carbon Sequestered on all of their websites.

The unceasing urban building boom in the most robust areas was finally catching up to demand. Housing was affordable, if smaller than before, and there were vacancies for incoming climate refugees.  All urban power had been renewable for a couple years.  The newly dense cities were also growing niche enterprises and becoming intricate. The trees planted ten years ago were starting to give useful shade. Micro-sequestration was the gardening fad. The State kept its promise and turned all five campuses into U.C.’s; tuition was free to all who had helped build them.

The upfront costs had been staggering, but by the end of the decade, they looked like a good investment. The news was no longer a weekly bludgeon of natural disasters. In fact, there was a steady stream of stories about species saved from the brink of extinction. Californians didn’t cough through smoke for two months in the Fall; the costs of fire management had leveled off. The Big Flood hadn’t incurred any response expenses; it had become an asset. The states who hadn’t prepared were now desperately asking for federal emergency money, but that had been long overwhelmed.

Mostly, people were used to it. The Olds resented how expensive meat and wine had gotten and missed their cars. But some found the low-carbon lifestyle familiar. It reminded them of a time with less stuff but better neighborhood life. The Youngs were used to living in dense cities; happy they could own their own place.  Their kids ran free in carless streets. A huge portion of their cohort had been part of the restoration projects and were forever attached to the trees, grasses and sea marshes they had planted. The worldwide need was still desperate, but California had shown people what could be done with a population willing to fight the emergency on every front.

UPDATE: This is bad form for a blog, but I am still tinkering with the post. If you think you notice small changes, you are likely right.

This section is as good as the rest of the paper and you should totally read it. But it is too sad for me to write about here.  I can hope that Dr. Bendell has noticed something universal when he writes (on this other page):

…I have found that inviting them to consider collapse as inevitable, catastrophe as probable and extinction as possible, has not led to apathy or depression. Instead … I have witnessed a shedding of concern for conforming to the status quo, and a new creativity about what to focus on going forward.

That would be nice.

Will continue with Agenda, Research Futures and Conclusions in good time.  I’d like to finish this paper, because now that you’re all back, I have new blog themes (within CA water, of course) for us to contemplate.

On a different page than any I have mentioned before, Dr. Bendell writes:

Some scholarship has looked at the process of denial more closely. Drawing on sociologist Stanley Cohen, Foster (2015) identifies two subtle forms of denial – interpretative and implicative. If we accept certain facts but interpret them in a way that makes them “safer” to our personal psychology, it is a form of “interpretative denial”. If we recognise the troubling implications of these facts but respond by busying ourselves on activities that do not arise from a full assessment of the situation, then that is “implicative denial”. Foster argues that implicative denial is rife within the environmental movement, from dipping into a local Transition Towns initiative, signing online petitions, or renouncing flying, there are endless ways for people to be “doing something” without seriously confronting the reality of climate change.

I am not going to do anything radical, like go read Foster (2015). That is not the blogging way. But I will latch on to the concept of ‘implicative denial.’ Because that shit is real.

To the extent that people take their cues from what official California is doing, when the State is dicking around instead of facing hard things, the implicative denial is contagious.  This is why it was (and is) so pernicious that the State Board wouldn’t ban new plantings of orchards during the drought years. They were telling us all that it was serious enough for every one of us to undertake moderate hassle, but their actions conveyed that it wasn’t serious enough for them to avert new, consistent, decades-long new water demand*. When people get two conflicting messages about how seriously to take the drought, denial will urge them to the weaker message.

Implicative denial also explains my impatience with each administration setting up a new water philosophy (CALFED, co-equal, portfolio, multi-benefit).  Seriously? Defining that and then working on a framework, performance measures, indices, alignment and re-org?  That’s what you are doing with your time? Now? In this era? Here, folks.  Here’s your resilience portfolio:

• Zone 2M irrigated acres to feed CA vegetable calories; make sure they get water every year. Set additional 1M acre increments to get water depending on the water year. Work from east to west in the Valley. Turn the entire Delta to sequestering carbon. (ag)
• Set instream flows 70% of unimpaired flows in every river. (enviro)
• Set 55gppd for every person’s personal water use. Source those as close to the use as possible. Pay the staggering costs of replacing our aged-out infrastructure. (urban)
• Get us out of the NFIP, set up new CFID to get people priced out of floodplains, pay for setback levees. (flood)
• Supplement CIMIS with a new whole-state, public access remote sensing tool (data)

There.  That would get you 90% of the way to resilience until society collapses in my lifetime for thirty years. Now you can stop dithering over what the portfolio really means and start doing the necessary work.  In Water, Jerry Brown wasted his two terms. We do not have time for another administration to waste on implicative denial.

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Systems of Denial was one of my favorite sections of Bendell’s Deep Adaptation paper.  I can’t improve on it, but I can apply it to CA water politics. Again, I have to assume you have the paper to hand; I can’t provide much of it here. I’ll start by looking at his four insights about what happens when we communicate the state of the climate. (Last full paragraph of some page.)

Insight 1: I read this aspect of denial as a way of refusing to acknowledge the extent of how bad it is becoming. We’ve seen the greatest expression of this in the water dinosaurs, who believe that we should build new dams, because if you put concrete across a river, it is necessarily true that new water will arrive to fill it. Fortunately, that mindset is dying out, now largely held by a sidelined bunch of old cranks. But the truth (even if we don’t include near-term societal collapse) hasn’t sunk in either. From here on out, we will steadily have fewer water resources than we have had.  It will cost a whole lot of money to adjust our infrastructure just to provide what we have now. We will have disasters that knock out something we need and love, and will limp along without it afterwards. All of our modeling and future scenarios should reflect that. For example, it is no longer a good idea to do robust decision making because even if things turn out well, the robust choices are still the good ones!happyface! We can skip that part and do the robust choices because we know it will not turn out well. The uncertainty has closed; we can quit modeling the mild climate change future scenarios.  That level of acceptance hasn’t sunk in yet through agency practices; reports that do not support techno-optimism are released quietly, if at all.

Insight 2: Dr. Bendell writes

Second, bad news and extreme scenarios impact on human psychology. We sometimes overlook that the question of how they impact is a matter for informed discussion that can draw upon psychology and communications theories. … That serious scholars or activists would make a claim about impacts of communication without specific theory or evidence suggests that they are not actually motivated to know the effect on the public but are attracted to a certain argument that explains their view.

I cannot tell you how desperately the agencies need in house social scientists. Apparently, I am genuinely unable tell you that, because I have tried three times before with no success. Perhaps in 2030, I will make another plea for in house social scientists.

Insight 3: 

A third insight from the debates about whether to publish information on the probable collapse of our societies is that sometimes people can express a paternalistic relationship between themselves as environmental experts and other people whom they categorise as “the public”. That is related to the non-populist anti-politics technocratic attitude that has pervaded contemporary environmentalism. It is a perspective that frames the challenges as one of encouraging people to try harder to be nicer and better rather than coming together in solidarity to either undermine or overthrow a system that demands we participate in environmental degradation. (emphasis mine)

This was pervasive during the recent drought. So much bullshit about residential water conservation, imposing extensive mental burdens and chores on nearly every Californian.  Infinite praise for their altruistic response! All so they don’t look over at our unimaginably stupid water rights system and think, ‘the fuck?’ I said during the drought and I’ll say it again: one day 99.9% of Californians are going to realize they could revise water rights instead of carrying their  shower water out to their roses one more time, and that day cannot come soon enough.

Insight 4: I liked this discussion of despair and the appropriate role of hope when it really actually is this bad. Bendell is right to mention looking to cultures that have experienced collapse to see what might work.  Mary Annaise Heglar is even more thorough and convincing. I do hope that there is transformation and openness to new ways of life after despair. Since, you know, we will do the despairing part either way.

My objection to the Newsom administration’s “portfolio approach” is that a “portfolio approach” is a method, not a goal.  So in CA water, I can’t tell what goal the administration is trying to accomplish with their eight years*, besides not alienate anyone who might donate to Newsom‘s presidential campaign in 2026.

Dr. Lund endorses the “portfolio approach” here. The way he makes sense of the concept is by going through each issue area, stating a goal, and showing how to use a “portfolio approach” for that goal. Which, fine.  But that reinforces my impression that the “portfolio approach” only means “do all the relevant good things to achieve all the relevant good goals.”  This is not a useful directive! This is just bland good will. In terms Dr. Lund might appreciate, this is a model as expansive as the system it models.

I should stop fussing about this, because we are committed now and it doesn’t exclude any of my own priorities and it is too ambiguous to be wrong.  I look forward to seeing what the interagency group tasked with enforcing this comes up with. I predict a lot of talk about transparency and collaboration and maybe even synergies from the multi-benefitness!

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